Hajra Naz
The Search Off The Record podcast team at Google recently reminded everyone to start with the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO), as attention frequently tends to drift towards the newest trends and sophisticated strategies.
Google Search Relations team members Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes, and John Mueller clarified that a lot of websites still require assistance with fundamental technical SEO problems including site crawlability, indexing, and page rendering.
The way a website performs in search results is strongly impacted by these fundamental elements. Therefore, they ought to be taken care of before less important optimizations.
Technical SEO: Foundation Before Innovation
Optimizing a website’s infrastructure and architecture for better search engine crawling and indexing is known as Technical SEO.
Technical SEO is different from creating content or promotion in that it just concentrates on a website’s backend.
Illyes explains why he frequently shares technical SEO-related content on social media:
Writing about technical topics is enjoyable for me because I notice that sometimes large sites are overlooked by their owners or SEOs because of a lack of fundamentals.
Illyes shared his experiences attending conferences where people were enthralled with the “next big thing.”
He claimed:
“The most important thing is to ensure that the content you are creating is of the high quality. I am a user trying to locate things, and these websites that individuals have put there are neither helpful nor valuable to me.
He further emphasized the importance of technical elements in SEO by saying:
There isn’t much that Google can do for you if the Googlebot can’t access your website, your rendering is terrible, or there are no tokens (words) on the page or website.
Splitt concurred, saying that technical SEO “is still important—it’s like all of those basics.” Since search engines consider a website’s homepage to be its most important page, he advised starting troubleshooting there.
Neglecting these technical details might result in serious problems like rendering errors or inaccessible websites, which can negatively impact a website’s search engine rating.
Quality Over Quantity: Reevaluating Traffic Measures
The ranking of content and the widespread misconception that high traffic equals high-quality pages was another important topic of discussion.
Mueller issued a warning about depending just on statistics and ignoring user experience:
”In some situations, I believe that focusing only on traffic is misleading.”
He gave the example of a website that ranks highly for general keywords but offers little to users. The overall statistics were alarming when the amount of traffic from those low-quality keywords dropped, although the loss was insignificant.
What Is It That You Should Focus On?
The hosts stressed that more reliable measures of a page’s quality and usefulness are those that go beyond traffic, such as user engagement and feeling satisfied.
Mueller claims:
“Although it’s almost necessary to consider the larger picture of all the traffic that has disappeared, bear in mind that Much of this was pointless.
To gain a better understanding of a website’s performance, he suggests tracking lower-level sites and concentrating on pertinent questions.
How To Create High-Quality Content?
Producing a lot of content isn’t enough; it also needs to have a purpose and benefit the target audience.
Illyes, however, makes the argument that producing content of high quality may be easier than most people realize.
The secret is to concentrate on the aspects of the website that will assist visitors in reaching their objectives. This could be addressing issues, giving thorough responses to frequently asked questions, or telling interesting and captivating tales.
Illyes says:
What if excellence is indeed easier to achieve than most people believe? What if the goal is to write a thing that, when they get to the page, will enable individuals to accomplish whatever goals they have?
Conclusions
Two important points are emphasized in this conversation amongst Google Search Relations team members.
Before tackling more complex strategies, it is imperative to grasp the basics of technical SEO. Second, a site’s success can be measured by factors other than traffic volume, such as its quality of material and user interaction.
They suggested that by concentrating on these areas, websites might dramatically increase their SEO performance.
